🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <AMANDA.91Jan5223311@jordan.iesd.auc.dk> amanda@iesd.auc.dk (Per Abrahamsen) writes:

   A new standard (ISO Latin1) has been created, which conforms to the
   ASCII standard, and is quickly being accepted.  The best thing to
   do might be to ignore ISO 646, and switch to ISO Latin1 as fast as
   possible.

I agree that ASCII is the de facto standard, and that it is
unrealistic to expect existing 7-bit ASCII programs to be updated to
ISO 646.

However, beware!  Latin1 does NOT cover all Latin-alphabet languages,
only western European ones (and excludes a couple of minor cases like
French oe and Dutch ij).  For instance, it is missing (Polish)
barred-l, (Czech) hacek-r, (Turkish) hacek-g, (Croatian) barred-d,
(Dutch) ij, (French) oe, (Romanian) t-cedilla, and (Chinese pinyin)
o-hacek.

And of course it does not cover other alphabets (Greek, Cyrillic,
Arabic, Hebrew, etc.), much less Chinese characters.

I do not think it appropriate to make a quick patch for Western
European languages which will have to be changed soon thereafter for
other languages.

It <<does>> seem appropriate though to insist that all string-handling
primitives be able to handle <<all>> 8-bit characters.  Although it
would be nice as well to permit string literals with (say) Latin-1, I
am now not convinced it is a good idea.  Natural-language literal
strings should always be separated from the program to allow for later
localization (translation of messages etc.).

And let's hope that the transition to 16-bit characters will not be
too painful when it comes.

	-s